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[ Editor’s note: following is the third guest post from the 1WD intern: the young, unpaid Shelby Vittek, who many of you will recall really shook things up with her first 1WD article (and continued that trend with her second). You can check out more of Shelby’s wine writing work at TableMatters.com, and find her on twitter at @BigBoldReds. You’re of course encouraged to chime in and let us know what you think (but keep things civil, you opinionated b*stards!). Enjoy! ]

Have you ever wanted to know what kinds of wines make up 1WineDude’s cellar? What exactly constitutes the mass of media samples he gets shipped every week? Where do they come from and exactly how many bottles are waiting to be opened and reviewed?

I used to wonder. But that was long before I spent months sorting through the endless boxes of wine samples in the cellar. In October, I bravely—and perhaps somewhat stupidly—agreed to take on the massive project of cataloguing and organizing them all. I had watched this episode of 1WineDude TV, (cut to 3:25) where I got my first preview of the mountain of boxes, but really had no idea how big of a challenge I had signed up for. At the start of my “internship,” I was prepared to personally catalogue maybe a couple hundred, 500 bottles at the most, and thought I’d finish the project within four or five weeks.

Yet here we are, over four months and 820 bottles later, and I’m just finally able to announce that every single wine has been accounted for and its details entered into a tracking spreadsheet. Of course, this number is bound to change the next time I hear the doorbell ring and am met with five more shipments of samples. But for now, the cataloging chaos has calmed, and my “wine friends” (as 1WD’s daughter calls them) have a slightly more organized home.

To celebrate the end of a huge undertaking—even if momentarily—I want to share with you some intimate details of the wines I’ve had my hands all over for months, as well as some things that surprised, perplexed, or disappointed me…

I’m interrupting all of the planned 1WD content to cave in and give you the low down on the 2010 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti event held at NYC’s A Voce Columbus earlier in March this year, to which I was invited (as just about any of you following my twitter feed already know).

I won’t be telling you the quirky about the that will appear, at some point in the near future, in all of its quirky… quirkiness in my Playboy.com Wined Down column. What I will tell you about is the stuff that didn’t make it into that piece: the geeky 2010 vintage details from Aubert de Villaine, and my expanded thoughts on each of the releases. You’ll have to go to PB later to get the other fun stuff; I’m also skipping the DRC preamble, since most of you are already familiar with it (short version: mostly monopole Pinot Noir that’s literally atop the Burgundian classification food chain, made in small quantities, widely touted to be the world’s greatest, and most definitely among its most expensive).

But I know that the geek-geek-geekiest among you want the scoop on these wines, and I know this because you’ve already tweeted, DM’d and emailed me about it.

Al lot. And not shyly.

So… fine, here it is, already!

First of all, there were a lot of friends familiar faces at that tasting: Elin McCoy, Mark Oldman, Andrea Robinson (whose stemware was chosen for the tasting, a nice coop for her), Jordan Mackay, and Eric Asimov, as well as quite a few NYC somms that I know who have high-end restaurant gigs (lucky bastards, all; I sat with them during the tasting, because let’s face it, somms are the most fun people in the wine biz). Former Wine Advocate critic Antonio Galloni was also in attendance; I didn’t get a chance to chat with him, though he did at one point give me a kind of odd look (which I took to be more a hey-am-I-supposed-to-know-you? glance than a what-the-f*ck-are-YOU-doing-here? glance). Hell, I’d have given myself an odd look at a DRC tasting, okay?

First, I’ll give you the bullet-point run-down of the gentlemanly Aubert’s take on the travails of the 2010 vintage for this tiny and elite spot in Burgundy, and then we’ll tackle the tasting notes for all of the releases, of which you’ll immediately notice two things…

Thanks to all of you who tuned in and/or sent questions for our The Punch Down Episode Three interview with Gary Vaynerchuk. We kicked off a tad late, but it was well worth the wait.

The replay of the live broadcast of our interview with GV is below – if you missed it, you’re in for a treat, as Gary (who connected via telephone) was in typically fine form, pulling no punches with his candid answers.

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